Mean Spirit

by Rickman, Phil

‘So, off you go. Much as we would value your input on this vexed issue, I’m afraid we can’t afford to pay you, Bobby.’

  ‘Pay’s not a problem,’ Maiden said.

  ‘Go home, lad. I don’t believe you murdered bloody Clutton, but I’m not having you anywhere near the investigation. Until we pull somebody, we’ll tell the media it was a hit and run and the car was nicked, which is why the driver pissed off. We won’t tell them who it was nicked from.’

  ‘Somebody will,’ Maiden said.

  ‘And I shall make it known’, Bernard Bradbury half-rose, ‘that if anybody leaks this, I will have his balls on a saucer, next to his warrant card. And you – I don’t want you muddying waters. I don’t want any freelance stuff, any private sniffing around. If you go away – which I strongly recommend – leave me a note with address and phone number. In fact, take your mobile and keep it charged.’

  ‘What if I disappear?’

  ‘You won’t. Will you?’

  ‘No,’ Maiden said.

  ‘Right,’ Bradbury said. ‘Have a nice time.’

  * * *

  ‘Guy’s right,’ Sister Anderson said over after-midnight fish and chips in the hospital grounds. ‘How’s he gonnae get to the bottom of it with you trampling the evidence?’

  It was Andy’s breaktime. Maiden had bought the chips from a van outside Feeny Park.

  ‘It’s a question of what they wanted the most, Bobby – you set up or Vic out the way. No’ for you to speculate. Get out the place, let the boss guys take care of the cleaning.’

  ‘Except they won’t. In the end, they’ll just recarpet,’ Maiden said gloomily. ‘They don’t want the scandal and they don’t want to spend the money. Nothing changes.’

  ‘In which case, you’re no’ gonnae change it on your own, are you, son?’ Andy stabbed at her chips with a wooden fork. ‘Jesus God, Bobby, for a guy working tae expand his inner consciousness and find enlightenment, you can be a real dense bastard sometimes. I was doing Saturday night patch-up jobs on Victor Clutton when you were still writing to Santa Claus, and I can tell you, this is no’ what the guy wid want. And don’t you go canonizing him. He’d only pawn his halo.’

  Maiden smiled. Andy looked up as an ambulance came in – no flashing lights, so that was OK.

  ‘Mind, y’ought to tell Marcus Bacton Vic’s gone. If the auld thug hadnae been around that day at the castle, Marcus’s guts’d be spread over his own doorstep.’

  ‘I’ll ring him tomorrow.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go call on him. Stay awhile in his wee dairy, borrow some of his weirdy books and contemplate your immortal soul.’

  ‘What, like you contemplated yours?’ Maiden said. ‘Aw, ah’m gettin’ oot o’ this, Bobby. Ah’m awa tae the sticks tae be a healer. See, when it comes down to it, you’re still here and I’m still here because we’re half-afraid it’s where we’re meant to be.’

  ‘No’ a problem. I’ll jump when I’m ready, but I may have to push you out the hatch. Meanwhile, you go off on your own to some sodden shore you’ll just think about it the whole time. Go listen to Bacton rant. Consider the Big Mysteries. Take a stroll in the hills with wee Grayle Underhill.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘No, you won’t. You’ll think about bloody Riggs and bloody Beattie. I’ll tell y’another thing – you’, Andy pointed the fork, ‘need a woman. You cannae fret over Em till you’re too old tae get it up.’

  ‘Who brought that up?’

  ‘Go home, Bobby. You want a herbal sleeping pill?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  When he’d gone, Andy went back to Accident and Emergency and smoked a cigarette, hanging out of the sluiceroom window.

  Remembering the night, not so long ago, when Bobby Maiden lay on his back, the crash team backing off, despondent – three minutes gone, three and a half. Andy refusing to call off the defib, hands on the top of his head, his hair all stiff with blood. Feeling, inside her own head, the sun rising beyond St Mary’s, through the gap in the stones of the High Knoll burial chamber, the heat travelling down to her fingers.

  A healing place.

  Despite the best efforts of the Health Service bureaucrats, Elham General was a healing place, too – though this was sometimes harder to credit than the legend of the Holy Virgin’s appearance at High Knoll.

  Andy dropped back into the room, looked down at the watch on her breast pocket: 2.25 a.m. She’d call Marcus when she came off shift, before Bobby could get around to it.

  She dunked her ciggy in the sink, went to take a look at Mr Trilling on the ward.

  XVII

  ‘SO NOW WE KNOW,’ GRAYLE SAID.

  Laying on the cynicism like mayonnaise because she really didn’t want Marcus to think she believed any of this stuff.

  The study looked tired and bleary. The fire in the stove was down to a bed of ash. Marcus put on a small log from the depleted basket and hauled his chair closer.

  ‘Great story, though,’ Grayle said, not allowing herself to think about it. She yawned and lay full length on the sofa, kicking off her shoes.

  Around half-past midnight Callard had elected to return to the dairy, maybe realizing that Marcus and Grayle would have a lot to discuss. Standing by the bulkhead light, Marcus had watched her cross the yard under the shadows of the ruins. He’d looked tired, weak, hopeless.

  ‘It’s late, Marcus, and you’re sick.’ Grayle pulled a cushion under her head. ‘Go get some sleep.’

  ‘Not tired. Or rather, I am, but…’

  ‘You want some cocoa?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know what you really think about this.’

  ‘Me? You’re asking the help?’

  ‘Don’t piss about, Underhill.’

  ‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to bloody talk about it now,’ Marcus thundered, snatching off his glasses, mopping his eyes and nose, thrusting the glasses back on.

  ‘You really don’t.’

  ‘You mean you don’t.’

  ‘OK.’ Grayle sighed. ‘Whatever.’ Swung her feet to the floor and sat up, hands clasping on her knees like in prayer. ‘Let’s lay this thing out.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I want your opinion, dammit!’

  Grayle shrugged. ‘OK. Well … essence of it is, after like fifteen years as this cool, fashionable, high-society psychic, Ms Persephone Callard can’t cut it any more on account of, whenever she tries to do a seance, only one spirit comes through and this is a bad spirit and it’s real close, closer than anything she ever experienced before and she’s like … soiled and full of fear, and the next day she’s debilitated, feels like shit. How’m I doing?’

  ‘Go on.’ Marcus opened the stove, put on a second log to produce flames.

  ‘What do you want me to add? All of this goes back to a particular night at the home of this former MP, Sir Barber, who’s paid out big money for no good reason.’

  ‘So you didn’t find it convincing.’

  Grayle didn’t reply. Callard’s evocation of the scene had thrown her a full and clear picture of this Barber’s sumptuous drawing room on an extraordinary night. A movie, with sounds: voices and a music track.

  And a smell. Callard describing how several people in the room had picked it up simultaneously – distaste on women’s faces. Then the drop in temperature, as though the heating had cut out, the same women reaching for jackets, cardigans, evening shawls.

  Persephone had looked up and seen a man sitting there, at the back of the room, clear as Marcus was now, she said.

  The man gazing impassively into her eyes.

  And his eyes were cold and cloudy and almost white, and seemed to lead nowhere. And while Callard had been describing it, Grayle was seeing it and feeling it. Deeply, deeply chilled, a cold worm in the spine, but doing her damnedest not to let it show.

  As she looked into the empty sp
ace suggested by the near-white eyes, she realized she was seeing into a space where the man had been. And then Callard had felt his freaking hands on her freaking face – moist, precise, surgical hands.

  Her voice cool, precise and clinical as she described it, but Grayle knew that same worm was also deep into Seffi’s spine.

  So. Why couldn’t she just have lost the trance-state, dropped out of it? A medium does not become possessed; the medium remains in control. The essence, the spirit, is dependent upon the medium for energy. Whereas this …

  This was so close and clear and impressively defined that even Callard had been in thrall to it. Although she knew it was entirely negative, it had an incredible … a compelling physicality, and some sick, greedy part of her didn’t want to let it go.

  Grayle shuddered now and tried to smother it by leaning forward and hugging Malcolm, who, now they were alone, had sidled into the room. ‘You didn’t like her, did you, honey? Freaked you out, right?’ Dogs almost invariably picked up disturbance, whether psychic or psychological.

  ‘OK, what spooked me’, she said to Marcus, ‘was the way she was able to describe the face. But then I’m thinking, if you were trying to dream up a really evil face it would look something like that.’

  A dark face. Thin-featured. Callard shaking her head in a swirl of lamp-lustred hair. Hooked nose. Hair flat, slicked back. When he first appeared, he was looking away from me, looking to the side, and I thought he was wearing glasses, and then he turned slowly, to face me. And then he smiled … he smiled at me. And when his face crinkled, I saw that it wasn’t glasses, it was a scar. Almost encircling one eye and running all the way back to his ear.

  Marcus asking, How far away was he from you?

  I should think, ten, fifteen feet…

  Yet he was able to … you thought he was somehow touching you with his hands.

  How fast does a thought travel?

  Hmm. What was he wearing?

  A grey suit. Three button, all the buttons fastened. Neat.

  ‘I mean, a scar?’ Grayle said to Marcus. ‘A goddamn scar?’

  ‘Be interesting to talk to someone who was at the party,’ Marcus said. ‘Someone else who saw … saw it.’

  Someone who saw what happened when Callard twisted out of her chair. Someone who heard the loud crack in the air, like a gunshot. Who witnessed the dislodging of a large Chinese vase from a niche in a corner of the room where nobody was sitting – shards of it everywhere, panic, people leaping up and running for cover, as though they imagined everything in the room was going to start exploding.

  For Callard, it must, at first, have been a merciful release of energy.

  … and then, being thrown, jerked, out of trance like that, I immediately experienced a wave of self-disgust. It was as though I’d been a willing participant in some ghastly sexual violence, some perverse crime. I felt like … I don’t know … Myra Hindley or somebody.

  Grayle recalled how she’d lost her lustre as she talked, had been hunched up into a corner of the sofa, her arms around her knees. Hell of an actress, if she was making this up.

  What did you do? What did you do then?

  I got out of there, Marcus. In the middle of the chaos, I slipped away and into the lift. I caught a taxi in Cheltenham and had him take me directly home … not to the hotel, all the way back to Mysleton.

  ‘And also, how come Sir Barber didn’t follow this up?’ Grayle demanded now. ‘Apart from to send the cheque … like, he actually sent the cheque.’

  ‘Perhaps they’d had what they wanted out of her,’ Marcus said. ‘A few moments of paranormal excitement. Something for them to gossip about for weeks.’

  Grayle wrinkled her nose in disbelief.

  ‘And anyway’, Marcus said, ‘she sent it back. Tainted money.’

  ‘Tainted career. Let me get this right – in the following ten days or so, she tries two other sittings, one for this regular circle she holds in London – rich matrons and like that – and no sooner does she hit trance than …’

  ‘The inference being that whatever came to her in Cheltenham, she took it away with her. Like a disease. A virus.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but … and you know this is unlike me, Marcus, to go looking for the psychological answer … but could we not be getting a mental projection of this woman’s own increasing negativity? She admitted that when she came out of it she felt a wave of self-disgust, right?’

  ‘Yes, but, Underhill—’

  ‘Marcus, you have a good hard think about this before you blow me out the sky. Could not that scarred, evil face be an image of her own soiled inner being? A realization of herself as a psychic trickster preying on the sick and the lonely and the frightened and the bereaved?’

  ‘Good God, Underhill!’

  She spread her hands. ‘I just throw this in, Marcus, for the sake of argument.’ And for the sake of a night’s sleep. ‘Curious that it all comes to a head the night she takes a pile of money – against even her own better judgement – for putting on a psychic sideshow.’

  ‘And the smell?’

  ‘Like a dirty dick? Interesting to think what that might be saying, hmmm?’

  ‘And the cold? And the Chinese vase?’

  ‘Look, I’m not gonna deny she may have psycho-kinetic powers. Sure, it could be coincidence, but let’s not argue about that. Think about the central issue – what do we have? We have a big karma crisis. Nervous exhaustion resulting from a major guilt trip. Of course it went with her when she left the party. It’s a part of her – an ugly reflection of her dark side. And every time she sits down to contact her friends, the dead folks, out it comes again. Wooh, gross!’

  Marcus started to say something and dried up. She heard him breathing like an old steam train in an echoey station yard. Then he came heavily to his feet.

  ‘She really has nobody to turn to, you know, Underhill. Her father’s abroad. She has no siblings. She isn’t in a relationship. No friends she can count on. She doesn’t even trust her own agent. And now this physical assault …’

  ‘She still puts on an act. Like when I first found her, you’d’ve thought she was an alcoholic, the way the place stank of booze. But is she drinking that way now? Uh-huh. See, I guess that was because she thought you were gonna come in person, and you’d be like, Oh my God, Persephone, how did it come to this? How can I help? What can I do to save you from this degradation? You want my opinion, Marcus, I think there’s still major stuff she isn’t telling us. Too many things that just don’t meet in the middle. But right now I’m not thinking too hard about the big mysteries. All I want is my car back out of Justin’s garage and for Justin, whatever kind of bastard he is, to still have a face, you know?’

  ‘Yes.’ Marcus bent and shut the woodstove. ‘Think I’ll go to bed.’

  ‘Good.’

  Grayle awoke under a woollen rug on the sofa, listening to the wind in the eaves and Malcolm snoring.

  A cold, silky moonbeam filigreed the books on the high shelves.

  She turned her head and saw by the darkness that the stove was out. She felt the weight of all the books on the walls. All that knowledge. All that speculation. You couldn’t trust anything in a book. You couldn’t trust your own memory, your own eyes, your own ears.

  She’d woken up thinking, Maybe I said it out loud. Maybe I actually spoke the words.

  THE BITCH IS MAKING THIS UP.

  Maybe she’d said it under her breath and Callard’s hearing was incredibly acute. Whatever, twice now, the first time at Mysleton Lodge, the woman had seemed to repeat to her her own thoughts.

  God-damn.

  Grayle thought, We need you out of here, Ms Callard. You’re an unhappy presence. A poltergeist. Marcus can’t help you with your problems. And me – I need my car back and you out of here.

  Throw that one back at me.

  XVIII

  UNDER AN OYSTER-SHELL SKY, GRAYLE APPROACHED THE STONES through stiff, yellow grass.

  A big vista from u
p here. Over to the east you could see the Malvern Hills, a line of small bumps. But there was no sunrise. No big, red, rolling ball today.

  ‘So, OK, what happened … one morning – it was midsummer – a young girl called Annie Davies came up here from Castle Farm. This was about 1920 and I think it was her birthday. She would be thirteen, and I guess all her hormones were churning up like the inside of a washing machine, so maybe she was ready for anything.’

  Grayle laid a hand on the collapsed capstone.

  ‘This monument is about four thousand years old and was oriented, we think, to the midsummer sunrise. A shaft of first light would pass through a slit in the stones and into the chamber. Though with the capstone collapsed, it’s hard to see precisely how that worked now, but you get the idea.’

  Persephone Callard nodded. Perhaps faintly bemused about why Grayle had insisted on bringing her up here, banging on the dairy door in the morning mist.

  Bemused – that was no bad thing.

  ‘So Annie Davies is up here – we don’t know whether she was standing on top of the capstone, which was already partly collapsed by then, or if she was inside. It’s still possible to get inside, if you’re small.’

  ‘Like you,’ Callard said.

  ‘Yeah, I did it, once. It was … strange. A strange experience. Anyhow, this is where she had the vision. On midsummer morning the sun came down in a giant red ball and settled on the ground and it rolls towards her along the hills, and out of the sun strolls this … lady. It’s hard to get a picture of it on a dull day in the wrong season, but—’

  ‘It isn’t hard at all.’ Callard wore jeans and a black, hooded sweatshirt. No time for make-up and her hair was still loose. ‘These places were very carefully sited according to the landscape and the heavens and the effects they have on you. Can we see Castle Farm from here?’

  ‘Down behind those trees. You can see the village over there, St Mary’s … the church … Uh, the legend of High Knoll is not too well known on account of the villagers, for all kinds of reasons, covered it up about Annie Davies. The Border temperament: play it down, don’t draw attention. No way did they want another Bernadette. Plus, the Anglican Church was apparently suggesting the kid was either lying or evil.’